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THURSDAY, March 28 (HealthScoutNews) -- Boys whose grandmothers took a long-banned hormone treatment for troubled pregnancies appear to be at increased risk of a rare genital malformation. A new study by Dutch scientists has found that the grandsons of women who took DES to stabilize pregnancy may be roughly 20 times more likely than other children to develop hypospadias, a rare birth defect in which the location of the urethra opening on the penis is askew. The condition, which occurs in between two and six baby boys per 1,000, isn't life-threatening. But it often requires multiple surgeries to repair and can leave significant scars on a man's sexual confidence. Text Continues Below
DES, or diethylstilbestrol, was a synthetic form of estrogen prescribed to 4 million pregnant women worldwide during the 1950s and 1960s on the shaky notion that it prevented miscarriages and preterm delivery. The drug was banned in this country in 1971 (but was available in Europe for another seven years), after reports that it caused vaginal and cervical cancers, as well as fertility trouble, in the daughters of women who used it. Men whose mothers took DES were also at risk of urinary and genital defects, including various testicle problems. Data in mice have shown that the drug's effects may extend into the third generation. But the new study, which appears this week in The Lancet, is the first to find such a legacy in humans. Flora van Leeuwen, a cancer epidemiologist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, led the study. She and her colleagues compared the rate of hypospadias in 205 boys whose mothers were exposed to DES in the womb and 8,729 whose mothers weren't exposed to the drug. Four of the 205 boys whose grandmothers had taken DES had hypospadias, compared with eight in the other group. In other words, van Leeuwen and her colleagues said, the odds of developing the defect were about 21 times higher than normal for the boys whose mothers had been exposed to DES as fetuses. Page: 1 | 2 | Next >>
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